This piece is an update on a classic painting of the American Dream by Norman Rockwell, entitled "Freedom from Want," one of his "Four Freedoms" which were inspired by the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led America out of the depression of the 1930's. On the left we see the original image, much as Rockwell painted it - the quintessential middle-American Thanksgiving dinner with a 1940's down-home dad and an apron-clad mom presiding over three generations of family. Norman Rockwell labored over this scene to make sure that it not portray over-abundance, but rather a straightforward American celebration. The update begins with Uncle Sam stepping in to snatch the turkey.

On the right, Uncle Sam delivers their thanksgiving transformed as gold bars to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the notorious investment bank that was at the center of the financial shenannigans that caused the melt-down of 2008, and which then received more tax-payer subsidies and credit than any other bank, made possible only because the Fed evaded regulations and changed it from an investment bank to a bank holding company late one night when Goldman Sachs was about to go bankrupt. Because the Treasury Department provided secret trillion-dollar bailouts, there is no agreed amount for the total that Goldman got but estimates put it at 600 to 800 billion dollars. They took that tax-payer money and handed out year-end bonuses of a staggering 18 billion dollars to their employees for a job well done. That gave Blankfein an estimated $250,000 per day of work. According to a report by the FBI, Goldman regularly covered their traders' expenses for cocaine and prostitutes. In fact, several madams sent invoices directly to the bank for hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover the traders' parties. http://www.thefix.com/content/wall-st-high-rollers-caught-pants-down

The iconic dining room on the left is now the deck of a yacht, the bowl of fruit has become a presentoir of caviar and the water glasses have become flutes of champagne.